Monday, June 14, 2010

A Rant on False Feminism

Cosmopolitan is NOT a feminist publication. The popular woman’s magazine that supposedly encourages women’s liberation does not at all promote liberty for women, but rather enslavement evermore to pleasing him. “How to get him to like you,” “How to please him in bed,” “How to be a great catch for him…” The liberal sex for personal feminine pleasure is completely undercoated with the theme of making him happy so that the woman can be considered sexy, beautiful, different, etc., to him. While debaters might claim that copious and free sexual encounters feed women's independence and progression by making her equal to men, the fact that this “progress” is continually all about him and using him to satisfy reveals that fundamentally, while women may be behaving more like for men for sexual satisfaction, the him still manifests a subordinate relationship. Forming an identity around being attractive for men and, much more, changing oneself to be attractive to men is exactly contrary to advancing away from male domination.

Thus, while Cosmo features articles boasting exerting sexual control over men, the fact that it is still about men proves that part of what Cosmo considers constitutes being a powerful woman is actually a woman that exists to please men sexually. For a woman to be “liberated,” identity, self-esteem and happiness cannot be based on the man but on being comfortable with the reality of who she truly is aside form how men—or even other women—perceive her. A woman should want to please a man because she likes him and wants to express her love in this way, not because she feels pleasing a man puts her in the dominant position and needs this ego boost to sustain her sense of worth. Feminism states that women do not need a man to tell them that she is beautiful for that to be true. And while often Cosmo does not endorse or believe this idea, I believe all women should.

3 comments:

So true. I have a related comment. I find it disappointing that so-called feminists often say that God is patriarchal and therefore oppresses women. Yet Jesus was so kind to women (the woman at the well, the woman caught in adultery, the grieving widow who just lost her only son, etc). And God in the book of Proverbs spends the first 3 chapters telling his child to seek after 1 thing--wisdom, and He describes that one thing in feminine pronoun. I'm not sure that feminists are really FOR women. They're not for me when I choose faith. Faith and feminism have become unnecessarily mutually exclusive.